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The Trump administration's "war on woke" continues apace, as the Department of Education recently announced the launch of an online portal at ENDDEI.Ed.Gov. (The name could use some workshopping.) Its main feature? A form to anonymously submit reports of "divisive ideologies" being taught in public schools so that the department might open an investigation.
In case there was any confusion over the ideological nature of the DOE's version of an Honesty Box, the press release announcing the portal quotes extensively from the founder of Moms for Liberty. "Parents, now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools," the MFL leader says. You might remember MFL for its role in calling for book bans in schools in places like Florida and New York. (We should also note here that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which catalogs hate groups, lists MFL as "an anti-government extremist group.") The group is now apparently a partner in shaping Education Department policy.
What's come next won't surprise anyone who has ever been on the internet: people gleefully spamming the hell out of the END DEI portal, some calling it a "snitch line for diversity" and others urging people to "rise up and use this portal against the very practices it's intended to enforce."
Of course, we've been through this before. In the 1950s, demagogues like Sen. Joseph McCarthy said that American schools were overrun by communist teachers who were surreptitiously radicalizing kids across the country to make them hate the United States. (It should go without saying, that paranoia was wildly overstated. Although as one researcher has noted, it was much more likely to be the students recruiting their teachers toward communism than the other way around.)
Then, as now, much of the moral panic over what's being taught in schools is really rooted in anxieties about the racial order of the United States. Then, people thought that the Civil Rights movement, and the integrated schools that were part of the broader agenda, were so fundamentally anti-American that they had to be a Soviet plot. And now, some see the Trump administration's attacks on DEI as an attempt to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement.
The Education Department's shift toward sniffing out insufficiently patriotic lesson plans comes at the same time as the Trump administration is terminating DOE employees, including more than a dozen from the Office of Civil Rights. Victoria DeLano was one of those let go. At the time of her firing she said she was the only OCR investigator based in Alabama. DeLano told a local news source that the Trump administration put a halt on her investigations and that workers were asked to focus on disability cases rather than those involving issues like race and gender. As an example of the kinds of cases that come into the OCR: last year the department investigated a case in which a group of white students at a Pennsylvania high school shared an image of themselves labeled the "Kool Kids Klub" — get it? — and told a Black student to "go pick cotton." The school district in question did not agree that this constituted a racially hostile environment.
And while some cases are reportedly being put on hold, the Department is busy opening multiple new investigations that align with Trump's political priorities, like getting rid of gender neutral bathrooms and banning transgender athletes from participating in women's sports. It's all part of a larger, radical reframing of what discrimination actually means in American life — and who might be able to seek remedies for being on the business end of it.
This week, Linda McMahon, who used to lead the WWE, was confirmed as the new head of the Education Department, and she has been vocal about going after "radical gender ideology". McMahon says she plans to help end the Department of Education, and the President is reportedly gearing up to officially order that the department is dismantled. The consequences for that are not-yet-clear and are likely to be vast, but we already know pretty well what it looks like when we leave things like discrimination enforcement in schools to be handled locally.
This newsletter was edited by Courtney Stein.
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